


Final Pressing

by CapnThatguy



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: EBook Lietner, Fan Statement, Gen, Lietner, dead bodies cw, injury cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 05:28:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18614092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CapnThatguy/pseuds/CapnThatguy
Summary: Statement of Alexander MacQuarie, regarding an unusual e-book downloaded to his device.





	Final Pressing

Statement of Alexander MacQuarie, regarding an unusual e-book downloaded to his device. Statement given September 17th, 2014. Recording by Jonathan Sims, The Archivist. Statement begins.

I love to read. I’m sure you’re scoffing at how normal that sounds, given where you work, but it’s true. You know how the clever kids in primary school just spent hours and hours tearing through every book they can get their hands on? That’s still me, only I’m thirty-seven, not eight. That primal urge to stuff as many words into your mind as you can, whether or not you actually absorb the information, never left me the way it seemed to leave everyone else. My friends in school started listening to music, playing video games, or going on dates, while I sat wherever I could and read through every book I could find. Once I hit university, and afterwards in various jobs, I would hear people talking about how “of course they loved to read, but they just couldn’t find time anymore”. Not that they ever said this to me, of course: I always had my nose in a book. There’s no time for idle chatter when there’s still more to be read.

I was never picky about the genre either; I’d sometimes go on binges where I’d only read sci-fi or murder mysteries or even dry reference books for a few weeks at a time, because something I’d read earlier scratched that itch perfectly and I was trying to recreate it. Most of the time though, as long as it was fairly well written and not horribly offensive, I’d tear through it in a few hours and move on to the next book without feeling like I’d wasted my time. 

Luckily, I managed to find a job about ten years ago that lets me indulge myself properly. I work security on high-end construction sites around London, making sure vandals and the homeless don’t try to sneak in to dangerous areas during the night. It’s easy work as long as you don’t mind the hours; I usually only had to go shout at someone once or twice a night, and if they don’t leave or if it looks like they’re armed, I just lock the door to the foreman’s office and phone the police. The rest of the time, I can read to my heart’s content, as long as I sit where I can see the motion sensors go off.

Good things can’t last forever though, and last year I found out that I’d pretty much read through my local library. It sounds ridiculous, sure, but when you’ve been reading at least a book a day for nearly thirty years, eventually the supply has to run out, and it’s not a big place, really. There were probably a few books left in the place, but it was mostly cookbooks and kiddie books that wouldn’t have given me more than a half-hour of entertainment even if I were interested. I never did learn to drive – my employer’s contracts were always with buildings that were near underground stops, and it’s not like there’s generally parking nearby anyways. So, it was with great reluctance that I turned to E-books.

For the record, I’m not some Luddite. Technology is mostly a pretty good thing, in my opinion. But after having spent so much of my life with the smell of old paper under my nose, reading from a brightly-lit screen just felt wrong, like the words were going to pierce my skin through the hard plastic of the case, or else just ooze off the screen like melted ice cream. Maybe all those articles about the death of print media got into my head without me noticing. It’s strange though, that for all people talk about the death of books, it’s not like they’re actually writing less. All these thoughts get posted online, fragments of books that could be, stories told in tiny chunks, but millions upon millions of them, forming a dense tapestry of tales across the Internet. Not that it helps me any. Ink or no, I need books I have to properly immerse myself in to really feel at home. Tiny bits I can digest in five minutes just didn’t cut it. Besides, I had to get a dedicated E-Reader, because my boss doesn’t want anyone using the Internet while on the clock. Do what you will to stave off the boredom, but there had better not be any pornography on shift. I chose not to mention that a great many e-books, particularly the free ones, are quite smutty. 

So I found the book early this year, first week of February, I think. I’d been working at 20 Fenchurch Street for about a year. I’m sure you’re seen the thing looming over the financial district. Lucky for me, the security room had been completed back in November and I had use of it now. Those makeshift construction offices get quite drafty in the winter, and while some of the insulation in the building wasn’t complete yet, I was comfier than I had been for quite some time. I’d been using the E-reader for about six months, and I was finally getting used to it. I’d just finished some YA novel about a witch coven in Chicago, and I was scrolling through my list of recently downloaded titles to find what to start next. There, at the bottom of the list, was a title I didn’t recognize. Final Pressing. The formatting of the title was off, just a little larger than the others in the list, so that the first line of the summary was cut off halfway through the letters, and the author couldn’t be seen at all. I could make out a few words of the summary – ‘books’, ‘demise’, and ‘change’ that I can recall. I also noticed that the download time didn’t make sense. According to the timestamp, I’d downloaded the book only an hour ago, but it was nearly midnight at that point, and the internet in the building wasn’t even set up yet, so that wasn’t possible. Intrigued, I opened it. 

It was nonfiction, I think. It read almost like a manifesto. I had been expecting some detective story, about a murdered librarian or something, but this was strange. The writer spent pages and pages talking about the wonders of the original printing presses, sounding as though they’d witnessed Gutenberg print his first bible, before going on about the end of the printed word like he was eulogizing it. The book spoke of how online media would render the human race as obsolete as the books it was destroying now. As the pages went on though, it started to get less coherent. At first it was just the occasional typo, or a minor error in kerning making a letter look like it had hopped onto another. Later one though, the words, when I could even recognize the as such, were full of symbols and letters that made no sense. And yet, I kept reading. All the way to the end, I read, clicking for change the page, over and over. One line I remember in particular, in a moment of lucidity in the text near the end. “As the ink and paper of the book has been replaced by the screen in the present, so too shall the flesh and blood of humanity be replaced in the abandoned Future by the unknowable tide.”

I started in my seat when I clicked forward and it took me back to the home screen. I glanced at my watch. Two hours had passed, and I had barely felt then happen. I quickly scrolled through the cameras and check the sensor log to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. There weren’t any disturbances noted, but I figured I should take a quick walk around the first floor to make sure myself. I put down my reader, flicked my torch on, and stood up.

The security room was on the ground floor, and the rest of the rooms on the level were smaller offices or meeting rooms. The upper floors would be rented in wholesale to various huge corporations. With the walls still only half-built, I could walk a wide loop around the base of the building and see pretty much everything inside. I checked the door on the stair as I passed it, but it was firmly shut. I made it all the way to the front doors, and was swinging my torch back and forth outside, when I heard something strange. Back behind me, there was a loud, echoing thump, like someone dropping a weight at the end of a stone hallway. I didn’t see anyone outside, so I quickly turned back toward the sound, calling out. I didn’t get a response, but as I came back to the stairwell, I saw that the door was now swinging open.

I stared at it for a moment. If there was someone inside who snuck by, I should have seen them on the way to the front. I shut the door to the stairwell and reopened it. It made a solid clicking noise, but nowhere near the thump I had heard. I shut it again, and then kicked the door open with my boot. It was a solid crash, but it still didn’t echo.

I should have went back to the office. Whoever was up there, as long as I watched the feed to make sure they didn’t come down, the police could deal with them. But no, I was curious about what they were up to, to have made that sound. I remember thinking at the time that if someone were to pop out from around the corner, my torch was heavy enough that a good hit would slow them down long enough for me to get away. So I slowly went up the stairs, looking for another open door to find whoever had crept past me.

As I climbed the stairs, I started hearing a new noise, something more mechanical. At first I thought it was someone using a nail gun, and I chided myself for being so worried – while it was definitely late, it wasn’t unheard of for a workman to be doing some overnight project. Maybe he’d just gone out for a smoke and I had missed him in my focus on the book. But as I reached the fourth floor, I started to heard the sound more clearly, and I knew it wasn’t a worker. It was too steady, too rhythmic. The door to the floor was open just a crack, and as I reached out to push it further, the sound seemed to multiply, dozens or more of the same machine, pounding out a steady stream of clattering. 

I recognized the noise just as I opened the door fully, as the clattering was interrupted by the sound of metal scraping and a hundred synchronized tings. Typewriters. The whole floor was full of desks, big wooden desks, laid out like an old-fashioned typing pools, with hundreds of typewriters clattering away on them. Sitting at each typewriter, on high-backed wooden chairs, were people. Or rather, what used to be people. They were all dead, their skin drawn across their skulls, half-mummified, mouths wide with the agony in which they’d died. 

I’d taken a step forward without thinking about it, trying to wrap my head around what I was seeing. That was when the door slammed shut. I quickly turned to try and open it again, but it wouldn’t budge. I slowly turned back toward the room, as the typewriters all reached the end of the line and slid back with a crunch and an echoing chime. 

I tried not to look at the bodies. All of this was impossible, clearly I was going mad or something, but that didn’t mean I had to indulge this madness. But I couldn’t help shining my torch across the nearest body as I slowly started to make my way down the row between the desks. That was when I noticed it. Obviously, the bodies weren’t typing, they were all dead; but somehow I’d still expected their hands to be resting on the keys, in some warped facsimile. They weren’t though. Their hands were further forward, and as my light drifted across the withered arms and clattering keys, I saw that the corpses’ hands were stuffed between the paper and the typebars. With each click of the keys, the bars were slamming into, and as I watched, through, the hands of the corpses. The typewriters slid back to the right with a crash, and I could see that despite the long-dead state of the corpses, the letters being typed with the blood of the bodies was bright red. On the page, over and over, it read: IT HURTS.

I ran then, down the row of desks past more desks, more typewriters, more bodies than should have fit in the room, until I reached the door to the other stairwell. I slammed my shoulder into it, not stopping to try and open it properly. It didn’t budge, and I landed on the floor as I bounced off. Instinctively, I glanced back around, as though my failure to escape would have alerted someone, something. Nothing moved but the typewriters. I couldn’t see the far wall where I’d begun though. Just endless rows of desks, endless rows of bodies. I pushed as the door again, but it remained firmly shut. 

I was frantically swinging my torch around, looking for another way out, when I saw it. At the end of the nearest row of desks, there was a single empty chair. The typewriter that sat there was silent. I slowly got back to my feet and stared at it. It looked like there was something resting in the machine other than paper. As my light hit it, I realized that it was an E-reader. The screen lit up as I recognized it. Two words were visible, large enough for me to read from ten feet away.  
JOIN US.

I ran. Right out the empty window, in fact. Doctors said I was damn lucky there had been a huge pile of dirt near the building. It meant that I only broke a couple ribs and an ankle, rather than dying against the concrete. That’s where the construction crew found me a few hours later, barely conscious and half-buried in the dirt. I’ve been in the hospital for the last couple days; the doctors were worried about internal bleeding. My parents came to visit, and thankfully brought a stack of books for me from their local charity shop. They told me that they would have brought my E-reader too, but one of the crew had found it after I’d been taken by the ambulance. It was in the security room, right where I’d left it, but it had been broken cleanly in half. I don’t mind though. I think I’ll stick to print for a while.

**Author's Note:**

> eisthenameofme on tumblr made a post about an Ebook Lietner a couple weeks ago, mostly as a joke, I think, and then this happened. So I guess not a joke? Anyways, here's a thing. Let me know if you like it, here or on avatarofextinction on tumblr!


End file.
